Counties Manukau Health / Social Media as an HR Tool

Strategy, Training

Mosh worked with CMDHB to create a digital and social media strategy to help its HR meet its objectives.

The Challenge: Counties Manukau Health (CMDHB) provides health and disability services to around 512,000 residents of the Auckland, Waikato and Hauraki Districts. It offers services ranging from Māori and Pacific health programmes to oral health, and from community and youth health services to emergency and after hours care. CMDHB reached out to Mosh to create a strategy and training program for its Human Resources team to use social media and digital channels to recruit staff, increase online employee engagement and establish a sense of digital/social empowerment. With a staff of 7,000 people, this was no small task.The Solution: In July 2014, Mosh worked with CMDHB to create a digital and social media strategy to help its HR meet its objectives.

When it came to the recruitment element, we put CMDHB’s website at the centre of our strategy, as that’s where jobs are listed (because of the clinical nature of many roles, third party websites such as Seek.co.nz and Trademe.co.nz aren’t appropriate). We recommended that CMDHB started a blog to increase website traffic and promote job opportunities, which would in-turn provide valuable content to share on social platforms. LinkedIn, perhaps the most obvious social platform used to source, search for and attract candidates, was also an integral part of our strategy. We suggested CMDHB created a company page where they would share blog posts, company updates and encourage staff members to list themselves to as employees of the company and share updates. Our strategy also included LinkedIn’s advanced search to source candidates.

Aside from promoting CMDHB’s vacancies, our strategy also focused on promoting the company’s multi-cultural work environment of the work place in one of the most liveable countries in the world (the specialised nature of many clinical roles means candidates are often sourced from overseas). To communicate this we recommended using Facebook, Twitter, Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and Search Engine Marketing (SEM) together to paint a picture of the CMDHB workplace.

The Result: Since we presented the strategy to CMDHB, the company has started a blog and uses LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter regularly to engage with its employees and to recruit staff. More than 1,500 of its employees list themselves as employees of Counties Manukau Health on LinkedIn. More than 3,000 people follow the page.

According to CMDHB’s talent acquisition manager, Nick Graham, the company has seen a significant increase in traffic to its website and a significant growth in LinkedIn followers. Line managers are utilising their own LinkedIn profiles to promote published content and positions. It’s now looking at investing in Search Engine Marketing and LinkedIn’s Careers platform, as suggested, to further the company’s digital presence.

In short, as Graham says, social media is a powerful HR tool because of its ability to be extremely granular in its targeting and CMDHB has and will continue to implement a very successful social media strategy.